Quality Assurance and development of a product are parallel activities. Complete QA includes reviews of the development methods and standards, reviews of all the documentation (not just for standardisation but for verification and clarity of the contents also). Overall Quality Assurance processes also include code validation.
A note about quality assurance: The role of quality assurance is a superset of testing. Its mission is to help minimise the risk of project failure. QA people aim to understand the causes of project failure (which includes software errors as an aspect) and help the team prevent, detect, and correct the problems. Often test teams are referred to as QA Teams, perhaps acknowledging that testers should consider broader QA issues as well as testing.